Whisper House Press

Notes from the desk of the editor are offered in the interests of personal posterity and transparency for writers and other potential editors who wish to learn from my experience.

the editor

The title of this post is long and obstreperous (just, like, chaotic) because the problem I’m addressing here feels that way to me.

As a publisher committed to doing my part to diversify the marketplace while rejecting slop and AI-generated material, I’m doing my damnedest to find my way through a dilemma I’m only now feeling I have the energy to discuss in a public way. The dilemma is complex. I’ll do my best to simplify it without diluting the compelling pull of its contradictory horns.

Horn the first: I want very badly to use any power I have to raise up other authors and support those around me (while widening the “around me” to weaken its culturally, politically, or economically constraints). This means I want to publish authors from English-writing authors around the globe. I need to to push beyond the United States, Australia, Canada, the U.K., and Western Europe. The people in these places are great, sure, and I’ll continue publishing all of them. However, I can’t very well speak with a straight face about wanting cultural diversity while cutting out most of the planet’s population. What of Indigenous people? Those in the Arab states? How about diaspora Jews in Russia who happen to speak English?

In early 2025, I had the honor of publishing a truly excellent writer from Zimbabwe. Her name is Valarie Chatindo, and she runs Shumba Literary. She’s connected with lots of writers in the literary community in her home country, and getting to know her has been a pleasure. I got to interview her for our YouTube channel last spring, and I’m publishing her The Egg Tree in Year One: A Whisper House Press Horror Anthology in December 2025; I first published the piece on our website and adore it. Without it, my collection of stories would be less good, and in an important way. Having a diverse group of voices helps us all to live better by broadening it. It works in the same way that a diverse gene pool helps descendants of biological organisms thrive. But I’m not here to tout the benefits of diverse views and voices; I’m taking that as a given and only want to say what I’m thinking about vis-a-vis this dilemma in publishing.

And Chatindo must not stand as representative for a nation or—as is unfortunately how many Americans will see things—a continent. I need more stuff from African authors. Just as I need more material from Southeast Asia, Japan, and Azerbaijan. I found Val through posting variously asking African and African diaspora communities to submit work for the Dread Mondays call. And that connected me with a writing group called “The Write Space,” which has since invited me to speak to them about publishing in international English-language markets. I need to keep pushing this angle, inviting people outside my own spaces to submit. I cannot reduce any of these human beings to mere tokens, and that means to publish more work from people who aren’t, in important ways, like me.

So that’s the tug toward accepting more work from submitters in what may feel like faraway places.

The other pull is to avoid publishing AI-generated material or previously published (or worse, straight-up stolen) stories. And I get a lot of junk emails from people who’ve used AI to generate plot summaries of books and stories I’ve published or written, along with—bizarrely—books written by people I know, offering to promote my (or their) work in their “book club” or through “book trailers.” I’m taking five or ten of these per day, minimum. Sometimes I’ll have twelve emails, and they’re all from bots or bot-equivalent scammers.

I have authors sign contracts promising that they haven’t used so-called (I qualify because there are different meanings of the term) “AI” to generate their stories or to develop their work. But what good is a contract based in Utah, USA with a writer from another country? Not much good. And bad actors who are using AI to write or co-write their stories and then lying about it? Not much good.

And you know who bots or AI generated emails sound like? They sound like people whose first language isn’t English. They can sound like people whose culture feels foreign to my own. Their constructions can sound stilted, uncertain, or overly formal.

You know who else might sound like all or any of that? Writers emailing me from India, Pakistan, or another seemingly faraway land. Their culture is different from mine, and I have a natural instinct to lump all that is other into one bucket.

As AI improves, it becomes more “natural” sounding, which actually means culturally more like my own habits in using language. The algorithm is reinforcing a cultural norm that does a disservice to everyone who doesn’t fit that norm. And I am not a fan of blindly following “the norm,” whether it be neuro-normative, gender-normative, or whatever else.

So this is the dilemma: Do I trash the emails that sound remotely like AI out of an abundance of caution while simultaneously reinforcing cultural norms I seek to overturn or at least get around? Or do I publish that short story from a person whose name I can’t pronounce from a major Indian city on the risk it’s actually from a person looking to make a quick $30 using AI to generate and mass distribute stories?

If I had other employees or an abundance of time, I could investigate each of the emails that comes from a sender who sounds like they come from the not like me bucket of most of the world as well as from AI and scammers. But I don’t have other employees, don’t have time to investigate the junk mail I get along with the genuine but culturally other emails I receive, and generally just am not great at telling the difference between the genuine and disingenuous.

So I don’t know how to split the horns of this dilemma. Not yet, anyhow.

All of this comes with a qualifier: I’m a well-intentioned idiot sometimes, and though it doesn’t exculpate my naiveté, it does explain it. What am I missing here? How can I do better? I want to be better, and I want to help other people.

til next time.

steve